When Self-Optimization Fails

"Picture this: I'm hunched over a garage floor, scrubbing away at the gunky paint remover I've spread over a fire-engine-red paint to make way for the aesthetically-pleasing home gym that's going to fix my existential dread. I refuse to paint over it. I have to do things the "right" way. As it turns out, even therapists are not immune to human suffering."

"As a clinical social worker, a trauma survivor, and a woman who once built her life around getting everything right, I've had to learn the hard way that true well-being isn't about always having the best outcome. This lesson didn't emerge in a vacuum. After years of self-work, I thought my life might get a little easier when I moved in with my then-boyfriend, three weeks before the start of the pandemic. Still, for reasons I couldn't comprehend, I found myself struggling with the adjustment."

"By then, I was seven years out of graduate school, licensed and running my own private therapy practice. I had also spent over a decade in therapy immersed in my own healing from multiple life-altering traumas. I had not only overcome significant personal hardship - I was supporting others to do the same, and from what I could tell, I was doing it relatively well."

A clinical social worker and trauma survivor who once centered life on perfection wrestles with persistent rigidity and self-optimization despite professional competence and extensive therapy. Attempts to control discomfort through strict routines, a pristine home, exercise, and nutrition prove insufficient when a major life transition and the pandemic trigger difficulty adjusting. Professional success and the ability to support clients coexist with private struggle and bewilderment. The path to wellness emerges not from flawless outcomes but from psychological flexibility, reframing standards of success, accepting struggle, and moving through hardship with skill and care rather than eliminating suffering.

Read at Psychology Today